"Communal living areas are history"

17/02/2010

Ability Chief Executive, David Williams, explains why Ability has phased out communal living areas from its supported living schemes ...

"As recently as 20 years ago - which admittedly is in the last century - all new supported housing was built with communal living areas. There were several reasons for this, including:

1. supported housing was not eligible for capital or revenue subsidy if it was fully self-contained (that's right; how bizarre is that?)

2. land was cheap - well relative to today's prices anyway

3. many professionals - who thought they knew best - deemed that disabled and vulnerable people couldn't possibly manage in a self-contained home as they were sure to be "lonely and isolated"

The first two of those reasons no longer apply, but regrettably the third paradigm survives in some places.

Ability builds all of its new supported living schemes without communal living areas. All of the accommodation is fully self-contained. We find this is the most successful model for enabling personalisation of support services and for promoting independent living. The presence of communal living areas tends to distort the behaviours of both staff and tenants in a way that works against those objectives. It's a recognised phenomenon known as "environmental determinism".

We've also embarked on, and nearly completed, a programme of investment to remove communal areas from our older supported housing schemes. We invariably find that there is scope to improve the space standards for existing tenants and provide additional units of supported housing for new tenants at little or no extra cost. That's a win-win, surely.

Why then do some local authority commissioners still specify the inclusion of communal living areas in new supported living developments? Why repeat the mistakes of the past?

We took one group of commissioning managers on a tour of some of our supported living services for people with learning disabilities. They talked to tenants and staff and promptly went back and changed their specification, removing the requirement for communal living areas.

One scheme they visited, which originally had 8 self-contained flats and some communal living areas, we had reconfigured to provide 9 self-contained flats and no communal living areas. Are the tenants lonely and isolated? Not a bit of it; they regularly invite a neighbour or two over to watch a favourite TV programme or to share a meal. A group of tenants frequently pops down to the local pub to play pool.

Because our support services are highly personalised, staff can support each individual tenant to plan and arrange their social activities according to his or her individual likes and preferences. Added to this, of course, there is one tenant here enjoying the benefits of his home and support service, who would not have had the opportunity at all but for the removal of the communal living areas.

So we have delivered improved accommodation space standards, provided more places, increased personalisation and shown an efficiency gain too. Isn't it time all providers and commissioners moved into the 21st century?"

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